UN says ‘killing of Gaza journalists should shock the world’
The United Nations has issued a statement calling for “accountability and justice” after the killing of five journalists in an Israeli army attack on Nasser Hospital.
“The killing of journalists in Gaza should shock the world – not into stunned silence but into action, demanding accountability and justice,” UN rights office spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani said in a statement.
“Journalists are not a target. Hospitals are not a target.”
Israel kills sixth Palestinian journalist
Israeli forces have killed Hassan Douhan, a journalist and academic who worked as a correspondent for Al-Hayat al-Jadida publication.
Al-Hayat al-Jadida reported that Douhan was killed by Israeli fire in Khan Younis, bringing the journalist death toll today to six.
In his final post on Facebook, Douhan paid tribute to the journalists killed earlier at Nasser Hospital.
“The martyrs of righteousness and conveying the truth, the word and the picture,” he wrote of the slain journalists. “The martyrs of national duty and journalism. To the eternal heavens, moons of the homeland and professional colleagues.”
MSF expresses outrage over Israel’s ‘impunity’
Doctors Without Borders, known by its French initials MSF, has denounced the “horrendous” Israeli attacks on Nasser Hospital.
Jerome Grimaud, MSF’s emergency coordinator in Gaza, underscored that journalist Mariam Abu Daqqa worked with the relief organisation.
“We are heartbroken by her death. Mariam leaves behind a son who must now grow up without his mother,” Grimaud said, adding that MSF staff members were forced to shelter in the laboratory of the hospital as Israel hit the building amid rescue efforts.
He expressed outrage at Israel’s continuing attacks on journalists and medical facilities “with impunity”. “As Israel continues to shun international law, the only witnesses of their genocidal campaign are deliberately being targeted. It must stop now.”
Israel is systematically killing witnesses to genocide: Journalist
Jeremy Scahill, co-founder of Drop Site News, says Gaza is enduring a “war of annihilation and extermination”.
“Israel is trying to systematically murder the witnesses to its genocidal actions, to the burning of children alive in tents, to the forced starvation of people and massive bombing of whole cities, razing them to the ground,” he told Al Jazeera from Zadar in Croatia.
Scahill said the “double tap” strike used by Israel to kill the journalists at Nasser Hospital was pioneered by the US during the infamous “war on terror” – when an initial drone strike would be followed by another attack to kill those trying to help the victims.
He said Western news organisations also contributed to “systematically dehumanising” Palestinians from the start of the war, and “serving as conveyor belts for the lies of an Israeli regime intent on wiping Palestinians off the map”.
